Helllooooo, devel list! It's that time of the month again! (No, not THAT time of the month, silly... the time when we roll an interim unstable release of Drupal 7 to keep people abreast of what's happening!) Below are some of highlights from UNSTABLE-4 => UNSTABLE-5. For those who like way too much information, I've also attached a copy of the full output from cvs-release-notes.tpl.php showing all commits. http://drupal.org/node/224333#UNSTABLE-5 has the details of contributed module developer-facing changes. Note: Patch Spotlight has once again been "upgraded" and is now part of the "Community Initiatives" handbook. I think I'm finally done moving it around now. :P~ Please check out http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core for important places to jump in, or to add your own itch that you're interested in helping to scratch! So, without further ado, here's a summary of what's been going on the last month: For developers: =============== * The biggest news of course is we now have a fabulous Field API in core! HOORAY! While there is still work to do, the initial patch and several follow-ups went in, which allows fields to be attached to both users and nodes. If you're interested in helping with this, please see http://drupal.org/node/361849 for a "jump off" point. * Another big, exciting development is hook_page_alter(). Page callbacks now return drupal_render()able arrays, which modules can then modify before they are output. Some crazy, exciting stuff can be done here. * Lots of documentation fixes/improvements: Thanks to the inclusion of API documentation in core, and thanks in part to our new "Novice" tag (http://drupal.org/patch/novice ), we've had lots of undocumented hooks documented, unclear comments clarified, and incorrect docs corrected. Please keep those patches (and issues) coming! * Comment and Taxonomy modules are now truly optional and can be uninstalled. In more radical news, *Block* module has also been made optional. OoOoOOo, scandalous. ;) * Performance improvements, including adding the ability to disable anonymous sessions to help with the Digg/Slashdot effect, mammoth hook_form_alter()s have been broken up to use hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() instead, and stopping filter_xss_bad_protocol from being called hundreds of time on each page. There is definitely still some work to do, but we're getting there! * Error handling has been improved. Core now uses E_ALL error reporting by default (which helps ensure squeaky-clean code), and changing its sensitivity can be done from a settings page instead of by hacking common.inc. ;) * Nedjo organized a great virtual internationalization sprint, which resulted in fixing of several annoying bugs (locale uninstall being broken, all languages being active in language switcher block) and made important in-roads to more complex features that will hopefully be part of a future unstable release. For users: ========== * Locale interface has been **dramatically** improved. It now behaves a lot more like the watchdog or node content administration screens do. * The vocabulary edit form has been also visually simplified by removing a bunch of needless fieldsets and the "weight" field. Ahhh... * Lots of textual improvements, too. For example, "Input formats" are now "Text formats" which help better describe what they are for. * There are snazzy new forum icons! Hooray! * Administration theme has been moved from under site configuration where NO ONE ever finds it, to the bottom of the themes page where people actually might. ;) Catch you next month, Drupalistas! -Angie